'D3US/X\M4CHIN4': special lightness in new work by Fernando Belfiore/Dansmakers

A wonderful performance full of hilarity, suspense and lightness, yet it sent me out into the world with a sad feeling. It seems as if the four women in D3US/XM4CHIN4 by choreographer/director Fernando Belfiore find themselves in the land of infinite possibilities. Anything they can do. Do they also want everything? Are they still themselves if they can do everything?

How does it feel when the earth drones along to its deepest depths with every step you take? Delightful. This is omnipotence. A fairy tale. A dream. But are it really your footsteps that cause that thumping, or someone else's?

Two forces drag women down: sexual desire and the technology that makes life so much easier.

It seems sex no longer holds any secrets for the four characters. Everything they do. Sex to the hilt. Predator-like they move across the stage, seductive, superior, harsh, sadistic, murderous. They seek intimacy, closeness. They want real. Boundaries blur. They even climb up the stands, wriggle among the audience and kiss some spectators. It doesn't get any closer than that.

Yet their game plays out far away. They make it a shiny and glitzy show, with all the rules, demands and clichés that come with a show. Intimacy and authenticity are deeply tucked away. The eroticism grows into shocking, degrading scenes that have nothing to do with reciprocity. The women are left with anxious faces and cramped bodies. Prey to the desire to go along with what society forces on them.

Hoover hose

They also deliver with technical gadgets. Mankind dreams of subjecting the whole world to its desires. A device with wheels makes walking unnecessary. Silently, one of the women glides across the earth. A drill can make flowers spin and a hoover hose also works as a microphone. Here, too, a line blurs: surrounded by all this technical convenience, the flesh-and-blood body becomes a machine. The four women are lost between their own desires and those realised by mankind. Fierce images of what sex should be, inventions and inventions that are supposed to make life even brighter: there is so much of it. Find yourself in this again.

Belfiore and the performers effortlessly dragged me into this complicated and confusing experience. D3US/XM4CHIN4 has a special kind of lightness and humour, through which the grimaces of discontentment come seamlessly. Luna Eggers Matz, Rozemarijn de Neve, Maria Metsalu and Jija Sohn are the perfect interpreters of this performance: witty, seductive, intriguing by the abandonment with which they throw themselves into their play.